GameStop Reportedly Sold Stolen NFTs on its Marketplace

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A while back, GameStop had an entire saga with its stock price lit­er­al­ly hit­ting the moon. There was a lot of pub­lic sup­port for GameStop then, and with such a pre­mi­um stock price the com­pa­ny had a chance to turn things around. Well how have they fared since?

Not great actu­al­ly. The com­pa­ny still strug­gles with the same fun­da­men­tal issues that plagued it for a long time. That hasn’t stopped them from try­ing any­thing that comes under the sun, and just recent­ly the com­pa­ny announced plans to cre­ate a new mar­ket­place for non­fun­gi­ble tokens, aka NFTs. 

That ven­ture is going as well as one would expect it to, again, not great! Recent­ly the com­pa­ny came under fire for sell­ing a NFT project that had con­tent ripped off from oth­er cre­ators. Nathan Ello, the indi­vid­ual behind the project, released the NiFTy Arcade col­lec­tion on GameStop’s NFT mar­ket­place. Unlike most NFTs, that are usu­al­ly just pic­tures, the NiFTy Arcade col­lec­tion actu­al­ly has playable 8‑bit games.

Con­se­quent­ly, the project did decent­ly well, net­ting a total of 8.4 ETH from ini­tial sales, which comes up to be around $13500 at present exchange rates. The only issue; Nathan didn’t hold rights to many games in his NFT pack. That means these games can’t be used for any com­mer­cial pur­pos­es with­out the per­mis­sion of the orig­i­nal creators. 

PICO‑8 demo

One of the more notable games, Galac­tic Wars, under a cre­ative com­mons license, was also includ­ed in the NFT pack. The emu­la­tion lay­er used to run the games, PICO‑8, was also used with­out per­mis­sion. Joseph White, the cre­ators of PICO‑8 told ArsTech­ni­ca, “PICO‑8’s license agree­ment does not allow use when author per­mis­sion is not grant­ed,“. Even a few oth­er games like Vol­cano Bytes, and Worm Nom Nom were also under a Cre­ative Com­mons asset license, and were used with­out permission. 

NFTs are a Messy Business 

This isn’t the first time these type of issues have propped up from a NFT project. The indus­try has seri­ous trou­bles with con­tent mod­er­a­tion and approvals, and enough bad faith actors are able to slip in. GameStop also faced pub­lic out­rage recent­ly over the “Falling Man NFT, which depict­ed a man in a space suit, replac­ing an orig­i­nal pic­ture of some­one jump­ing from the North Tow­er dur­ing the World Trade Cen­ter attacks. 

The rea­son pro­po­nents have a hard time explain­ing NFTs, in my opin­ion, is because NFTs aren’t a sin­gu­lar con­cept. They’re a bun­dle of relat­ed con­cepts. NFTs are a clus­ter of super­fi­cial­ly sim­i­lar but func­tion­al­ly het­ero­ge­neous enti­ties, in much the same way that “cryp­toas­set” or “blockchain” are too seman­ti­cal­ly dif­fuse to be con­sid­ered a sin­gle tax­o­nom­ic element.

By Nic Carter on Medium

And this is exact­ly why NFTs are so hard to mon­i­tor for any plat­form. Even with more strin­gent checks, it’s only a mat­ter of time before GameStop has to deal with some­thing like this again. 

As for the NiFTy Arcade col­lec­tion, that has now been pulled from GameStop NFT plat­form. The cre­ator Nathan Ello, claimed that he was unaware of the license sta­tus of the games, and has since offered to share remu­ner­a­tion with the orig­i­nal developers. 

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